8 ms·
A billion dollars is not bad for a site that started as a fake-it-til-you-make-it piracy site. I only know the story 4th-hand. But, my understanding is that i
by mindcandy 6y ago
A billion dollars is not bad for a site that started as a fake-it-til-you-make-it piracy site. I only know the story 4th-hand. But, my understanding is that it started as a user-upload site (I.e. piracy with disclaimers). And, of course, the seed users were actually employees with puppet accounts pirating media to their own site.
That kicked off real users who competed on getting the highest quality subtitle jobs uploaded quickest after the first broadcast of a given show in Japan.
Once viewers outside of Japan learned that they could get episodes same-day as Japan, they flocked to CR. Of course, this was only possible because CR did not attempt the impossible task of convincing the producers to allow this to be possible.
Once the CR audience was high enough, there were two obvious consequences: 1) They were too big to fly under the radar and were likely to be sued soon. 2) Their audience was large enough to be offered in negotiation with the publishers for a legit contract. So, that's what they did. They offered a fair revenue split with the publishers in exchange for being a legitimized distributor.
There are lots of ways that this could have gone badly. Most piracy sites do as much as possible to exploit the material and the viewers for short-term gain. Most publishers reasonably lawyer-stomp such sites as fast as is feasible.
But, in this case it worked out. There's no way CR could have negotiated with the publishers up-front. They were starting with nothing at all to offer. No audience. No reputation. No capital. Nothing.
Their approach was not legal. But, it was small and respectful-ish enough to not be worth suing until it was large and respectful-ish enough to be worth negotiating with.
Do not recommend this business plan. Glad it worked out for them.
- zdw 6y agoAnime fansubs have been around for 3-4 decades (ever since the early Amiga could overlay subs) and digital for 20+. Interesting that it worked out for them, unlike what happened with music distribution, and then the Napster/iTunes/Spotify evolution. Probably helped that there was only extremely slow and expensive legitimate distribution channels and actual work was required to make the content accessible in other languages. Rakuten's Viki service is another interesting model - they license content, then give people early access and crowdsource the translations, where the only benefit of translating is getting the $5-10 monthly service for free.
- jrockway 6y agoI think that Crunchyroll was successful because Japanese media companies considered the US market a joke. The companies that distribute anime in Japan never tried to sell into the US, they just assumed we weren't interested. Crunchyroll could then show up, say they had some customers willing to pay, and decided $LOW was better than $FREE. It's still this way; you can buy anime box sets in the US for an entire series that costs less than a single episode in Japan. (They segment the markets by burning English subtitles into the actual video. No self-respecting Japanese person would buy that, right? Ironically region codes don't work because Japan and the US are in the same region! DRM fails again.)
- Hamuko 6y ago>It's still this way; you can buy anime box sets in the US for an entire series that costs less than a single episode in Japan. Clearly you have never bought anything published by Aniplex of America (not that I'd blame anyone for that). PERSONA5 the Animation Blu-ray is $300 (allegedly down from $400 retail) for 28 episodes. https://www.rightstufanime.com/PERSONA5-the-Animation-Blu-ray https://www.rightstufanime.com/PERSONA5-the-Animation-Blu-ra...
- ivegotnoaccount 6y agoJapanese animation blu-ray are often, as strange as that may sound, even more overpriced: After a quick look, Perdona5 seems to have at least 10 boxes. Not ridiculous since they tend to contain 2-3 episodes. But each is 6600 JPY. That's more than 600 dollars. Even in VOD, I've seen some website that make you pay 150 JpY per episode... And 4000JPY for the last one. The US prices are high compared to France ones (we can get 100 episodes of Monogatari Séries for 90€, but that is a discount compared to the japanese price)
- lstamour 6y agoWow. I had no idea. On Amazon.jp, sold by Amazon.jp, Persona5 anime is broken into volumes, each with 2-3 episodes: Volume 1 is ¥5,958 and has 2 episodes, volume 2 is ¥6,695 with 3 episodes, etc. It's priced like you're buying a limited edition movie as 3 episodes might be roughly the same length. Browsing other ANIPLEX releases on Amazon.jp, it doesn't appear to be all that unique to Persona either. SAO Alicization appears to be similarly priced and released in small 2 episode volumes. It might be somewhat unique to ANIPLEX but I do see other anime sold this way. That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime (Season One) is only broken into two parts, ¥5,198 and ¥6,061 each on Amazon. This seems more reasonable. In Canada it retails for roughly CA$50 each part, though reviews complain that the boss fight isn't over until you watch part 2 of the season and reviewers say they prefer buying a box set with the full season rather than just one part...
- nsoonhui 6y agoWasn't this the path of YouTube also?
- coopsmgoops 6y agoAnd Spotify?
- gazab 6y agoYup. You could sometimes find scene release group names in the metadata when Spotify beta launched. They cleaned it up in the "great purge" where 90% of my playlists became empty :)
- sneak 6y agoNow, these same sites that grew to prominence based on the efforts of pirates are now going to lengths to thwart them. Is there a better example of pulling the ladder up behind you than this? I can't think of one.
- treeman79 6y agoHollywood is in California because film makers didn’t want to pay royalties to Edison on cameras.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y agoNimby property and development laws?
- VectorLock 6y agoThe founders of Spotify were involved with BitTorrent clients so it was a natural extension.
- verroq 6y agoYoutube’s owners didn’t upload copyrighted content to their own site with fansubs. It was all in: go legit or die in a lawsuit.
- just-juan-post 6y agoYeah I'm pretty sure 99% of video and image services do this.
- seibelj 6y agoI know where the bodies are buried for a few businesses with successful exits, and the story they tell the world vs. reality can be quite different! There is a personality trait I call “hustling” - the ability to do whatever it takes to succeed. Many successful entrepreneurs are hustlers. Another way to look at it is “the ends justify the means”, especially when the ends are life-altering wealth.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoSimilar to what Uber did in many countries. In many cases they simply started operating without approval from local authorities.
- hamolton 6y agoI don't know if this is true, but I read somewhere that Pornhub/Mindgeek was a "fake-it-til-you-make-it piracy site", and still is for studios that aren't active about takedown requests, except with their money they were able to buy a lot of the IP from studios that had shut down due to streaming.
- fishbacon 6y agoA recent video by youtuber We're in hell actually covers this quite well imo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEYB02EZtVs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEYB02EZtVs
- hamolton 6y agoAh so I was right! I didn't expect to be watching a 48 min youtube commentary video, but here I am.
- makomk 6y agoThat's more or less true of all the tube-style porn sites (of which Pornhub ended up the biggest an Mingeek ended up owning most of them), but it's also a little different in that, much like YouTube, they were ostensibly intended to allow people to upload their own videos that they'd created and quite a few did. Honestly, I think the commercial porn industry saw that as just as much of a threat as the actual piracy and a lot of the hostility came from permitting this kind of user-created content.
- JohnBooty 6y agoGood summary. I actually did not know about CR's grey-market roots. That kicked off real users who competed on getting the highest quality subtitle jobs uploaded quickest after the first broadcast of a given show in Japan. This has definitely been a thing since before CR! Before CR "went legit" the non-Japan market for anime was severely underserved. You could download illegal fansubs for free, often within 24 hours of its broadcast in Japan. Or... you could pay major $$$ for official US releases years later. And a lot of series were never released here at all. * VHS/DVD/BluRay sales clearly indicated that plenty of folks wanted to pay for this stuff. * Fansub torrent stats clearly indicated that plenty of folks wanted this stuff sooner than the industry was giving it to them. And yet, somehow, it took about 15 years for the industry to bridge this gap. As somebody on the fringes of the industry, it made me want to scream. It didn't exactly take a major leap of cosmic brainpower to realize that while not all fansub-downloaders would pay for this stuff, this was the hardcore segment of the fanbase and certainly some of them would.
- kbenson 6y ago> Do not recommend this business plan. There are so many examples pro and con. Theranos is a good example of both, weirdly enough. Although it all ended rather badly, and in a spectacular way, it worked well (for certain interpretations of that word) for a long time before that. If they were able to actually leverage the billions they got into materializing the technology claims they made, they would have survived, and the crooks at the helm would still be extremely famous and well off. That's probably worth considering when thinking about the people at the helm of a lot of these large companies, especially the ones that lose money quarter after quarter until they eventually don't. That's not a position that seems like it rewards integrity.